Modern Point of Sale (POS) systems have greatly increased the ease and convenience with which many modern financial transactions are conducted. By providing a single location at which a customer's bill is totaled, payment is taken, corresponding records are stored, and a receipt is issued, POS systems allow customers and merchants to complete and record their transactions quickly and easily.
POS systems are, however, not without their drawbacks. POS systems can be expensive and burdensome for merchants to install or implement. Numerous different POS systems exist, many of which do not accept every payment form. POS systems also often rely on a single piece of hardware, such as a register, that requires customers to move to that location to conduct their transactions. Attempts to solve this problem by implementing multiple POS registers at a single merchant incur significant expense due to the added hardware required.
Conventional online fixes for these problems typically involve use of a mobile application program, or mobile app, that customers can download and that allow customers to pay online through the mobile app. However, such mobile apps present their own challenges. For example, payment services often require customers to use their app, so that each app only allows payment through a single service. Customer payments are also sent to an account run by that payment service, rather than the bank account of the customer's choice. Also, the requirement to download and install an app can lead to clutter if a customer desires to use multiple different payment services at different times, and thus must download/install multiple apps just for payment. Finally, app download and installation may simply require time and effort that customers do not wish to invest, and can compromise customer security if the app is ever compromised.
Ongoing efforts thus exist to improve the ways by which customers and merchants conduct transactions.